The Anatomy of Melancholy

There is no better restraint than superstition for terrifying people’s consciences and keeping them in awe. They make new laws and statutes, invent new religions and ceremonies, all as so many screens for their own purposes. For this religion, even if false, provided it is believed true, tames fierce spirits, restrains desires, and makes subjects obedient to their prince.

That is why, Polybius says of Lycurgus, he maintained religious ceremonies: not because he was superstitious himself, but because he saw that mortals were more inclined to embrace paradoxes than anything else, and dared attempt nothing evil for fear of the gods.

This was Zamolxis’s stratagem among the Thracians; Numa’s device when he said he had spoken with the nymph Egeria; and Sertorius’s with a stag: to give their decrees greater authority by deriving them from the gods. Or else everything they did was divinely inspired, as Nicolaus of Damascus observes of Lycurgus, Solon and Minos: their laws were dictated on the sacred mountain by Jupiter himself.

So Muhammad attributed his new laws to the angel Gabriel, under whose direction, he declared, they had been made. In Dio, Caligula pretended to be on familiar terms with Castor and Pollux, and there were many such devices which kept the Romans in subjection. For, as Machiavelli shows in Discourses 1.11–12, they were above all moved by religion, most superstitious. These means restrained the people more effectively than force of arms or the severity of human laws.

Speaking of religion, Vanini says in On the Wonderful Secrets of Nature, book 4, dialogue 1: Only the easily deceived common crowd acknowledged it; the great and the philosophers did not at all. Your grandees and philosophers had no such belief, but used it to consolidate and enlarge their dominion, which they could not maintain without the pretext of religion. Many thousands in every age have held as much, especially philosophers: they always recognized these things as little fables, yet fear of the public authorities forced them to remain silent. They kept silent for fear of the laws, and so on.

For this purpose Pherecydes of Syros, Pythagoras’s teacher, first put forward the immortality of the soul among the pagans in the East, as Trismegistus did in Egypt, along with a host of invented gods.

Those Druids of France and Britain first taught in the West, Caesar says, that souls do not perish, but after death pass from one person to another, so that they might inspire courage.

It was for a political purpose. With this aim the ancient poets invented the Elysian fields; Aeacus, Minos and Rhadamanthus, their judges below; the Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto’s kingdom, and the various torments after death. Those who had done good went to the Elysian fields; evildoers went to Cocytus and that burning lake of hell, to be tormented for ever with fire and brimstone.